LaCie's 2big Thunderbolt 2 and Rugged Thunderbolt DAS Review

Performance Evaluation - Rugged Thunderbolt

The Rugged Thunderbolt comes in various capacities (two SKUs come with hard drives, while the other two come with SSDs). One of the important aspects to remember is that the connectivity is with first generation Thunderbolt (as well as USB 3.0). This is completely acceptable, as the device is meant to be used standalone (or as the end device in a daisy chain setup). No SSD exists right now with the capability to saturate a 10 Gbps Thunderbolt link, so there is really no need to go the Thunderbolt 2 route (with the 20 Gbps links that may be helpful in daisy chained setups with a display being driven).

Unlike the 2big Thunderbolt 2, there is no RAID involved. The stress is on portability (bus-powered nature), ruggedness and performance.

One of the problems with SSDs is that performance may degrade over time, unless garbage collection / TRIM is activated on the SSDs. Availability of TRIM for external drives is a hit or miss. We checked for TRIM activation on the Rugged over both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connections using Vladimir Panteleev's TrimCheck tool.

On our particular testbed, we found that TRIM wasn't activated over Thunderbolt, but worked over the USB port directly off the PCH. These results are definitely dependent on the OS / nature of the end system and readers' mileage may vary.